Appearing before the powerful Senate Finance Committee in Washington, DC, recently, Dr. Maggie Bennington-Davis, psychiatrist and chief medical officer of Health Share Oregon, devoted a significant portion of her testimony to the role of adversity and toxic stress during childhood on adult health, both physical and emotional. She explained how Health Share Oregon—that state’s largest Medicaid coordinated care organization—examined the people with the costliest health bills and found them to have experienced high levels of childhood adversity. She told the senators that the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study), first published in 1998 by Drs. Vincent Felliti and Robert Anda, found exactly this correlation.

For the last two years, nearly all students referred for mental health services in seven school-based health centers in Deschutes County, OR, have taken the 10-question adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey.

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Minnesota has the potential to become a trauma-informed state if the hard work is done to raise awareness of ACEs and the impact of toxic stress on brain development, says third-term state representative Rena Moran (D-St. Paul). Moran led the effort to have a resolution—similar to ones passed in Wisconsin and California—read in the legislature in March to educate lawmakers and the public about ACEs and related research. Democrats and Republicans took turns reading the resolution.

This month, the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities will kick off a multi-million initiative designed to help service providers translate scientific findings around child trauma, toxic stress and developmental brain science into public policy.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Canada-based Palix Foundation have committed $2.2 million over three years for the Alliance, a powerful membership group of youth service providers, to sub-grant to 15 participating nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and Canada interested in leading child trauma-based reform. All sites will be funded $50,000 for two years, and a developmental evaluation will be conducted within the three-year period.

The “Change in Mind: Applying Neurosciences to Revitalize Communities” initiative is one of several recent efforts aimed at increasing the policy impact of trauma-related research.

According to Change in Mind Director Jennifer Jones, the 15 organizations will serve as leaders in their communities and across the public sector on how to apply trauma-related practices. While each organization may have a different set of policy and advocacy goals, they will share successful strategies with each other and participate with an outside organization to evaluate effectiveness. The initiative kicks off this month in Chicago with an organizing conference that will help develop collective goals to accompany the specific policy priorities of each site.

The moment is ripe, Jones said, for nonprofit service providers to take a leading role in encouraging adoption of trauma-informed practices.

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The Basic Education Funding Commission (BEFC) of Pennsylvania has led us all, in Pennsylvania and beyond, to a tipping point for educational equity – if the legislature endorses the BEHC detailed “fair funding” recommendations.

There’s no doubt that the task of the commission was daunting. Education funding concerns are very weighty and very high profile in Pennsylvania. House Bill 1738 set up the BEFC and tasked it to “develop a basic education funding formula and identify factors that may be used to determine the distribution of basic education funding among the school districts …”

The BEFC recommended factors required for fair funding. Eight are included in a proposed formula and eight are recommended for consideration by the full General Assembly.

The California Assembly Health Committee today approved, by a vote of 16-0, a resolution to encourage statewide policies to reduce children’s exposure to adverse childhood experiences. California took a page from Wisconsin’s playbook with the introduction of legislation (California Assembly Concurrent Resolution (ACR) No. 155) on May 28. It drew upon ideas from Wisconsin’s legislation (Senate Joint Resolution 59), approved by the legislature this early this year. Both the Wisconsin resolution and the California proposal encourage state policy decision-making to consider the impact of early childhood adversity on the long-term health and well being of its citizens.

Before the vote was taken on June 17, the lead sponsor of the California bill, Assemblymember Raul